Sermon: Maundy Thursday 1 April, 2021

One of the unfortunate consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, is that, as we all know, we’ve had to change the way we do things during our church services. One of the casualties of that, is that tonight, we can’t continue that great Maundy Thursday tradition of the Washing of Feet.

I suppose though, how much of a sadness that is, depends on how you feel about having your feet washed. Some people are quite happy for the parish priest to wash their feet but others, are most definitely not happy about it. And I suppose which of those two camps you fall into depends on your feelings about feet in general because I know that some people just don’t like feet and really don’t want anyone touching their feet. Even though some people do feel that way though, there’s not usually a shortage of people who are willing to have their feet washed on Maundy Thursday, in fact, there are usually more people willing to have their feet washed than the required number of twelve.

Having said that, I can remember a couple occasions in the past when it seemed that no one in the congregation of the parish church where I was serving at the time, were willing to have their feet washed on Maundy Thursday. It must be said that, on each occasion, when I first asked for volunteers to have their feet washed, there was no shortage of them; a lot of hands went up. But when I said that we were going to do things slightly differently that Maundy Thursday, it was a very different matter. What I said was, that in line with our Lord’s instruction that his disciples should wash one another’s feet, I would wash the first person’s feet, but then that person would wash the second person’s feet, the second would wash the third, the third the fourth and so on until we got to the twelfth person, who would then wash my feet. As I spoke, I noticed that the hands started to go down and by the time I’d finished speaking, everyone had put their hands down. And, when I asked again who wanted to have their feet washed on Maundy Thursday, no one put their hands up!

I must admit, it came as no surprise to me that a lot of people put their hands down when I said what we were planning to do. But I was disappointed that everyone put their hands down and that no one was willing to volunteer to have their feet washed in those circumstances.

And I was disappointed because, actually, what I was suggesting we do, is far more in keeping with what Jesus said to his disciples than the way we traditionally carry out the Washing of Feet in Church on Maundy Thursday. Just think about the words we’ve just read:

“Do you understand what I have done to you?  You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am.  If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you.”

Quite clearly then, both by word and example, Jesus is not telling us to let one person wash everyone else’s feet, but that we, his disciples, should all wash one another’s feet. That’s obviously not what we usually do on Maundy Thursday and it’s not the Church’s tradition, but I think this is one example of the Church being complicit in encouraging Christians not to follow the example and teaching of Jesus. And that was clearly shown in those parishes where so many people were prepared to let a priest wash their feet, but no one was prepared to wash any feet themselves.

There can’t be any doubt that we, as Christians, are called to follow Jesus’ teaching and example, whatever that teaching and example is; we can’t call ourselves his disciples if we’re not prepared to do that. That’s made clear in our baptismal promises, and if we were baptised as infants, as most of us probably were, in the promises we took on for ourselves at our confirmation. And we can’t say we’re not aware of what those promises are because we renew them, every year, either at the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday night, or on Easter Day. We’ve promised to turn to Christ as our Saviour, to submit to Christ as our Lord and to come to Christ who is the way, the truth and the life. And we pray for the strength to follow Christ in that way, in his way. So we can’t be in any doubt that we’re called to follow Jesus’ teaching and example, because we’re reminded of it every year and we renew our promises to do that, every year.

The thought of washing someone’s feet might not be a particularly pleasant one for some people. It might be a teaching and example of Jesus that some people wouldn’t really be too keen on following. But in light of our baptismal promises, it’s a teaching and example of Jesus that we should all be prepared to follow if necessary.

And in fact, if we think about the meaning of Jesus’ washing his disciples feet on Maundy Thursday, we find that it has many, many similarities with the meaning of our baptism.

Washing the disciples feet and being baptised were both things that Jesus didn’t have to do but did. And they’re both things that he commanded us, his disciples, to do too. In Jesus’ time, when someone arrived at a house, their feet would be washed to remove the dirt that people had picked on their feet as they’d walked on the dusty roads and footpaths of the time. And baptism is about washing as well. It’s not about washing away any physical dirt that we pick up on the roads and footpaths, but it is about washing away the dirt of the sins that we pick up as we travel along the road of life. It’s about being washed clean from that sin. That’s one way we understand the symbolism of pouring water over people at their baptism, and we symbolise that at the Renewal of Baptismal Vows on Holy Saturday and Easter Day by sprinkling with water from the font.

In the introduction to the Church of England’s baptism service, it says that, in baptism,

‘…we are washed by the Holy Spirit and made clean. Here we are clothed with Christ, dying to sin that we may live his risen life.’

St Paul speaks in these terms quite often in his letters. He speaks of the baptised being clothed in Christ or putting on Christ, and he explains what that means, the kind of life that those who are clothed with Christ should live. He says that the baptised should put their old, sinful ways behind them, and live according to Christ’s teaching and example. In fact, when people are baptised, they become members of the Church, they become part of Christ, part of the Body of Christ as St Pauls puts it. And we find Jesus saying words very much to the same effect in the Maundy Thursday Gospel:

“If I do not wash you, you have no share”, or “nothing in common with me.”

So we have these similarities between the Washing of Feet on Maundy Thursday and our baptism and baptismal promises. And when we look at it in this way, we can see that following Jesus’ teaching and example to “wash one another’s feet” is simply a living out of our baptismal promises.

And to wash one another’s feet is a better way to live out those promises than simply having our feet washed by someone else.

In Jesus’ time, washing the feet of others was the job of a servant or a slave. But it was something Jesus, our Lord and Master himself did. But didn’t Jesus also say to his disciples that,

“…whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”?

I know that the thought of washing someone else’s feet isn’t a very pleasant prospect for many people. Some perhaps think it’s beneath them to do such a menial job. But it wasn’t beneath Jesus’ dignity to do it. He is not only our Lord and Master, he’s our God too, and he washed the feet of his disciples. Are we too proud to follow his example?

Some people perhaps think washing someone else’s feet is a thoroughly loathsome thing to do, or even to be asked to do. They might be disgusted at the prospect. I’m sure Jesus wasn’t too thrilled at the prospect of being scourged and crucified on Good Friday, but he did it, and he did it for people who, on the whole, didn’t appreciate what he’d done for them. And he did it for you and for me. Can’t we even bring ourselves to do something much less unpleasant, like washing someone’s feet, in return?

Most people will probably never be asked to wash someone’s feet as part of their Christian discipleship, but we can see the washing of feet as a metaphor for all the difficult and unpleasant things we may be asked to do as disciples of Christ. We’ve allowed Christ to wash us in the waters of baptism so that we can have a share in him, so that we can be part of him, part of his Body, the Church. We’ve promised to have something in common with him by following his teaching and example. So are we prepared to wash each other’s feet, as he commanded us to? Where do we draw line between what we will and won’t do for Jesus, the one who gave his life for us?

Amen.  

The Propers for Maundy Thursday can be viewed here.

Sermon: Palm Sunday 28th March, 2021

Holy Week is always a very moving time of the year for Christians. It can’t really be anything else because, as we remember and commemorate the events of the last week of our Lord’s earthly life, they remind us of just how much Jesus suffered for our sake and the depth of the Father’s love for us. But this year, I think Holy Week will be especially poignant for us because of what we’ve all gone through during the past year.

As we go through Holy Week, we’re reminded of just how quickly life can change. Today, on Palm Sunday, we begin Holy Week by celebrating the Lord’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. And it was triumphal. Crowds of people lined the streets and threw their cloaks and palm branches on the road in front of him, or walked ahead of him, heralding his arrival in the city, clearly and openly acclaiming him as the Messiah with shouts of,

“Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest!”

But within a few days, all that had changed. By the end of that week, Jesus had been betrayed by one of his friends, arrested, beaten and abused, rejected by the very people he came to save, and put on trial for his life. The cheering crowds had gone and had been replaced by crowds baying for his blood, even his friends had deserted him. And finally, he was put to death, though he’d done nothing wrong at all. And I think that dramatic change in Jesus’ fortunes over the course of those few days will resonate very strongly with us this Holy Week because of the year we’ve just lived through.

Just over a year ago, we were busy preparing for Holy Week and looking forward to Easter 2020. But then, suddenly, everything changed. We couldn’t keep Holy Week or Easter in the way we always had in the past, and were expecting to again, because our churches were closed down. The freedom we take for granted was taken away and we went into lockdown. On 15th March last year, which was the last Sunday we were in church before the lockdown, I don’t think any of us could have foreseen what was about to happen nor, when it happened, that our lives would be restricted for as long as they have been.

As we’ve gone through the events of the past year, the lockdowns and tiers and all the other restrictions we’ve had to adhere to, people everywhere have been looking forward to things getting ‘back to normal’ so that we can get on with our lives again in the way we did, and took for granted, before we were hit by the coronavirus pandemic. But, although there is some light at the end of this particular tunnel now, for many of us, things will never go back to normal, at least in the sense of going back to the way they were pre pandemic.

People will have changed over the past year. So what they want to do, and are willing to do perhaps, maybe even what they’re able to do, will have changed. And so the lives of their families, friends, neighbours and colleagues will be changed too. Society will have changed and what was acceptable, everyday behaviour before the pandemic, might not be so acceptable and everyday, post pandemic. And, of course, many people have died during the past year, both of Covid-19 and many other causes too. And our lives will be permanently changed because they are no longer here with us. We may soon be able to go back to doing the things we did before the pandemic, going out for meals or to the pub, going to concerts and sporting events, coming to church without any restrictions on what we do when are in church, being able to go to work, assuming we still have work to go to, even something as simple as meeting our families and friends when we want to: we may well be able to do all those things again soon, but doing those things will not be that same as it was because some of the people we used to do those things with, are no longer here to see and share those things with us.

Things have changed since last March. People have changed. The world has changed. And things will never be the same again for many of us. But, in a way, that is the message of Holy Week and Easter. Holy Week tells us just how very quickly life can change; and change for the worse. But beyond Holy Week lies the greatest change of all. A change that turned the most terrible of defeats into the greatest of victories. A change that turned the most heart-breaking tragedy into the most joyous of blessings. A change that turned the deepest despair into the greatest hope ever given to human beings: Easter and the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We know that we’re in a constant state of change as we go through life. We know that some of the changes we have to go through are hard and unpleasant. Some of the changes that happen in the world, change our lives forever, and some of the changes that we go through in our lives, change our worlds forever. Covid-19 and the pandemic has been one of those changes.

But if the events of the past year have changed the world, and our worlds, forever, so did the events of the last week of Jesus earthly life. Holy Week tells us how quickly our lives and our worlds can be thrown into chaos and confusion. It tells us how quickly things can go wrong and how quickly things can change for the worse. But beyond Holy Week, Easter tells us how quickly bad things can turn around and become new, good, and even better, things. And amidst the changes of life, Holy Week and Easter reminds us of some things that never change:  God’s love for us and Jesus’ presence with us in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Holy Week and Easter tells us too, that Jesus is the eternal Son of God who lives forever. And if our world has been changed forever because we’ve lost loved ones during the past year, we have Jesus’ assurance that they’re not really lost to us forever, but merely hidden from our sight for a time because where he is, they are too. And it’s there where we will see them again when we too are called from this world to our place in the Father’s heavenly house.

That is the message and meaning of Holy Week and the hope and promise of Easter and they are very poignant and powerful at this time when so many people are looking for certainty amidst the confusion of life during this pandemic, and for meaning and hope in their lives.

Amen.

The Propers for Palm Sunday can be found here.

Sermon: Fifth Sunday of Lent, 21st March 2021

This morning’s Gospel reading marks a pivotal moment in St John’s account of Jesus’ mission and ministry. But if we take this reading at face value, it probably seems anything but that. In fact, taken at face value, it seems a rather strange story. To recap. Some Greeks want to see Jesus but, instead of speaking directly to Jesus, as so many others had, they go to Philip and tell him they’d like to see Jesus. Then, rather than taking them to Jesus himself, Philip tells Andrew, and they both go to put the request to Jesus. But Jesus’ response is quite strange. There’s no record in the Gospel that he spoke to the Greeks, or that he even saw them, instead he starts talking about the hour of his glorification having come, about his death, about judgement being passed on the world and about drawing all people to himself when he is lifted up from the earth. So what’s going on here? What is Jesus saying here that’s so important, and what is St John trying to tell us through Jesus’ words? 

One of the problems with the way we read the Scriptures in Church is that we chop them up into ‘bite-sized’ pieces so to speak. We do that so that the readings we have in Church aren’t excessively long, but in doing that, we very often make the readings more difficult to understand because we take them out of the context they’re set in, in the overall story. And that’s certainly the case with this morning’s Gospel.

Reading St John’s Gospel as a whole, we know that by this point in the story, the religious authorities had started to plot Jesus’ death. The part of the Gospel we heard this morning comes shortly after Jesus had attracted great crowds of people to himself by raising Lazarus from the dead, and it comes immediately after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem on what we know as Palm Sunday. That attracted great crowds to Jesus too and the religious authorities were getting worried, they were very likely frightened too. We know that because, in the verse immediately before this morning’s Gospel starts, we read;

‘So the Pharisees said to one another, “You see that you are gaining nothing. Look, the world has gone after him.”’

That’s the context in which we have to read this morning’s Gospel.

In the original Greek language the Gospel was written in, it’s clear that the Greeks who wanted to see Jesus were not Greek-speaking Jews but Greeks by birth. And so in the coming of these Greeks, gentiles who are looking for Jesus, symbolically at least, the whole world was indeed now going after him.

We also know from our general reading of the Scriptures that ‘to see’ very often means not simply to see with our eyes, but to see with our minds and hearts too: in other words, ‘to see’ means to know and understand. And so what these Greeks were really asking Philip is to know and understand Jesus; who, and possibly what, he really was. We also know that Jesus’ mission and ministry was to the Jews. As he himself said to the Canaanite woman who begged him to rid her daughter of a demon,

“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

We know that Jesus did help the Canaanite woman, and other non-Jews during his ministry. But that was on account of their faith and St John doesn’t say that these Greeks came to see Jesus ‘in faith’; they were simply enquiring about him. They were looking for understanding and they would need to be brought to faith. And that wasn’t Jesus’ mission and ministry, that was the mission and ministry that he was going to entrust to his disciples and to his Church. And we see that played out in this morning’s Gospel.

These Greeks, these non-Jews, wanted to see Jesus. They wanted to know and understand him. But they didn’t go directly to Jesus, instead they went to his disciples to enquire about him. And it was up to the disciples to bring them to Jesus. It was through the disciples that they’d ‘see’ Jesus, that they’d come to him and come to know and understand him. So what this short Gospel story is about and why it’s so pivotal in the Gospel as a whole, is that it marks the end of Jesus’ own earthly mission and ministry, the mission and ministry to the Jews, and the beginning of the Church’s mission and ministry to non-Jewish world. The disciples almost certainly didn’t recognise that at the time, but Jesus certainly did, and that’s why he answered the request in the way he did. 

Earlier in St John’s Gospel, Jesus’ prophesied his own death when he spoke of himself as the ‘Good Shepherd’. He said,

“I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father.”

And now, the sheep of another fold, symbolised by the Greeks, were coming to him. And so he knew the time to lay down his life had come. His ‘hour’ had come. The time for him to be glorified had come. The time for everyone to ‘see’ him, to know and understand who he really was, had come. And he knew that would happen when he was lifted from the earth because it would come through his death, through him being lifted up on the Cross. It would come through his Resurrection, through him being lifted up from the grave. And it would come through his Ascension, through him being lifted from the earth back to the Father from where he’d send the Holy Spirit on his disciples to empower his Church to go out into the world in his name, to draw all people to him.

If we look at Jesus’ words in this morning’s Gospel in this context, we can see how much sense they make and how important they are. We can see what Jesus means when he speaks about a single grain of wheat, failing to the ground and dying, so that it can yield a rich harvest because he was the single grain whose death yielded a worldwide faith and Church. We can see why Jesus says that earthly life is less important than eternal life because if he hadn’t laid down his earthly life, there would have been no Cross, no Resurrection and no Ascension. People wouldn’t have been drawn to him and there would have been no faith in him and so there would have been no hope of eternal life through him. And we can see what Jesus means when he said that where he is, his servant is too. Not only because he promised to be with his disciples always, but also because whenever and wherever his disciples bring someone to know and understand Jesus, that person ‘sees’ him.

This morning’s Gospel reading isn’t very long but, if we read it in the context of the Gospel as a whole, we can understand how important it is and why St John made it such a pivotal moment in his account of Jesus’ mission and ministry. If we read this Gospel story in it’s true context, we can find so much in so few words. And amongst the things we find in these words, is own place and role in the Gospel and in Jesus’ story.

We are Jesus’ disciples. We are his Church. Today, we are the ones entrusted with continuing Jesus’ mission and ministry to draw people to him in our own time and place. Today, we are the Philips and the Andrews because we are the ones people come to when they want to ‘see’ Jesus. Jesus promised to be with his disciples always, so we know that he is here to be seen. What we have to do is make sure that we are his disciples and servants so that wherever he is, we are too.  And we need to do that so that, when people ask us to help them know and understand Jesus, we can see him well enough ourselves to help them find him and see him.

Amen. 

The Propers for the 5th  Sunday of Lent can be found here.